1. The Field of the Present Disclosure
The present invention relates to electronic commerce through communication networks, and more particularly, to systems, program products, and methods for managing advertisement development and placement on social network websites.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic retailers, like their brick and mortar counterparts, like to attract consumers to their storefronts. In addition, electronic retailers like to encourage consumers to linger at their storefronts and to entice the consumer to make purchases. It is recognized that the conversational and participatory nature of social media promotes lingering and follow-up visits, as illustrated by the recent success of sites such as MySpace, Facebook, You Tube, and Flickr. Furthermore, such social media can offer unique opportunities for consumers to interact with products and demonstrate the use of products in creative, humorous, fantastic, and interesting ways by publishing consumer-produced pictures, video, and audio clips. These demonstrations are often persuasive expressions of appreciation in that they often take place in real situations with real people under real conditions, as opposed to taking place in a studio with scripted actors under artificial conditions.
Search engine results can be instrumental in driving a significant portion of internet traffic to their storefronts. Overall, however, such driving force is not done so proportionally. Various websites are favored by the search engines over others. That is, some websites are more attractive to the search engines, than others, depending upon their content. As such, recognized by the inventor is the need to develop or obtain access to content that is more attractive to the various search engines. Also recognized is that social media tends to attract very favorable natural language search results from the various search engines. Such social media generally includes blogs and other social network websites having any communications format where users publish the content, such as, for example, internet forums, message boards, web logs, wikis, podcasts, audio, pictures, and video. The favorable natural language search results for social media may be at least in part due to the significant context provided within social media both in terms of the amount and nature of the content.
Although such social network websites, such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, and numerous individual blogs, are very popular in terms of overall internet traffic, inherent in social networks, however, is the challenge of motivating authors and content providers to create and offer content. As Milton Friedman popularized, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” To monetize, or in many cases subsidize, their efforts, many providers of social network websites attempt to obtain sponsorship or advertising revenue.
Under conventional advertising models, advertisers typically sponsor content on various websites using cost-per-viewing or cost-per-click-through to determine the value of the advertising by estimating the amount of traffic to the website. That is, under the conventional models, advertisers pay for impressions or click-throughs. The inventor has recognized that many advertisers can be uncomfortable assigning a value to an impression of or a click-through from an individual blog or other social network website and that the conventional models for advertising on social network websites, therefore, underperform. Accordingly, the inventor has recognized a need in the art to provide incentives and commissions for third-party content development for a website of an electronic retailer.
The inventor has further recognized that an electronic retailer has the ability to better value the advertising on a social network website by tracking behavioral information about a consumer from click-through to purchase and by generating commissions to content providers, social network providers, and/or both, in response to actual consumer behavior, as opposed to relying exclusively on impressions or click-throughs. The inventor has also recognized numerous advantages with an advertising model that directly associates social network websites with an electronic retailer.